360掳: Healing Traditions in West Africa
What does it mean to be healthy, on a medical, personal, and social level, and how do people employ other organisms, including plants, and special activities to heal?
What does it mean to be healthy, on a medical, personal, and social level, and how do people employ other organisms, including plants, and special activities to heal?
What does it mean for a person, a group, a country, a region, or the world, to heal? What does it mean to be healthy? Healing draws on multiple disciplines鈥攆rom culture to social science to natural science鈥攁nd can鈥檛 be properly understood through a single lens. This cluster examines the past and future of West Africa with a focus on healing in a variety of systems: from the traditional healing system, the use of plant materials in the biomedical system, to the ways that society views itself and uses its narratives鈥攂oth written and audiovisual鈥攖o heal. These three interdisciplinary courses explore what it means to be healthy, on a medical, personal, and social level, and how people employ other organisms, including plants, and special activities鈥攕uch as music, dance, rituals, incantations, and purification ceremonies鈥攖o heal. Together, these courses offer students a framework to analyze how African societies use these legacies to face the health challenges existing in the contemporary world, to appreciate the complexities of these issues, and to envision solutions.
Students travel to Senegal, where they talk to practitioners: healers, pharmacists, medical practitioners, historians, and scientists to get a sense of how traditions are preserved or have evolved. Some field sites include medicinal plant markets, traditional hospitals, botanical medicinal gardens, health related NGOs, and a monastery.
Courses
This course is a combined lecture- and hands-on course on the biology, evolution, and diversity of economically important plants, particularly plants used for food, fibers, and medicine. It uses a series of case studies of key plants鈥攃offee, cacao, rice, sugar, etc.鈥攖o illuminate important aspects of plant biology, from biochemistry to conservation to climate change. Themes of the course include: the history of plant domestication around the world, the role of humans in shaping agricultural/medicinal crops from prehistory to the present, and the diversity of food and medicinal crops in the world around us. In this version of the course, case studies will focus on important food and medicinal crops in West Africa, including peanuts, cotton, cacao, moringa, Madagascar periwinkle, cereals (millet, rice, sorghum), and more鈥攁nd particular attention will be paid to the agricultural challenges found in semi-arid environments like northern Senegal. Students will be introduced to standard field methods for identifying plants using on-campus field excursions and their final project for the course will be a paper exploring the scientific and ethnobotanical knowledge of a plant they encounter on the field study. Taught by at Haverford.
This course will borrow from Achille Mbembe鈥檚 views of Africa in which it is decolonization that ushered a temporal rupture which made possible a wide array of futures for the continent. After an introduction on the history of the region (background, French influence and gender relations), students will be able to examine local and global knowledge and their potentialities on the ground through a variety of approaches that include healing practices related to well being in various areas of life, through the arts, literature, music and film. It is this exchange with both diasporic and local artists and thinkers, through lectures, readings and workshops at 色色研究所 and in Senegal that students will be able to find some of the answers to questions this cluster is raising. They will investigate the consequences of decolonization into the present through a series of modules and examine the differences, consequences and overlap of all the knowledge.s, creativity and futures that exist on and for the continent.
The course will focus on the triple legacy of African healing traditions, Islamic medicine, imperial medicine, and medical pluralism since independence. We will examine issues of public health history, social and cultural history of disease as well as the issues of the history of medicine. We will explore various themes, such as the indigenous theories of disease and therapies; disease, imperialism and medicine; medical pluralism in contemporary Africa and differential access to health care. We will discuss the histories of global initiatives to control disease in Africa from an interdisciplinary perspective (history, and social and biomedical sciences), using case studies from across the continent. We will also explore the questions regarding the sources of African history and their quality.